Sir, I'm not that confident it will be resolved. When I was posted in the United States at one point with Ambassador Frank McKenna, he turned to me when we were getting into the negotiation that led to the 2006 accord and asked when all this started. I phoned a friend who was the Librarian of Congress, and he said it went back to the second George Washington administration, when Massachusetts, which then included Maine, was trying to keep out timber from New Brunswick for shipbuilding.
This is a dispute with long antecedents. If you look at a topographical map of North America, we have a great advantage when it comes to wood, but it is for the small landowner particularly in the southeast who may live in a trailer park. It's where they hunt and fish, and it's their annuity. If you go down to the museum of timber in Jackson, Mississippi, you'll see that they post the price of timber just the way a gas station posts the price of gas.
I was told by a former American governor that we would resolve it, but we would resolve it on an incremental basis, so I'm afraid it's going to take some time.
The challenge within Canada, as I see it, is that we have four and a half positions. There's a position in the Atlantic, in Ontario and Quebec. They're similar. There's a position in Alberta. Then in B.C. you have a division between the coastal and interior regions' positions. Happily, we now have envoys from each of the provinces. I hope that the British Columbia government keeps David Emerson because he's very smart and understands this stuff.